Wednesday, August 13, 2014

A Day in the Life

[Email dated 8.9.14]

Hey everybody,

This was a fairly "normal" week.  I don't think there is any such thing as a normal week anymore,  but it was as normal as it could get.  A least, we didn’t travel anywhere.

We've been doing a lot of preparing for the trainings that we are going to be doing this next month and planning for the next couple of months.  We actually had a 5 hour meeting with President and Sister Gomez.  When we got out of there I was thinking, “That was a pretty long meeting” and then I looked at my pocketwatch [see HERE and HERE regarding his “pocketwatch”, clearly still getting the job done] and noticed that the meeting that started at 4 took us until 9....haha!  That was surprising.  We did not plan it to be more than an hour and a half!  It was very productive though, so that’s good.  

Because of the geographic layout of the mission, being that half of the mission is outside of Iquitos, we are travelling half of the month every month going to Tarapoto, Moyobamba, and Pucallpa to either give trainings or to have interviews with president.  We won't always have all that much time here in the offices in Iquitos or even in the city.  For example, this week that is coming up, we're going to Tarapoto and Moyobamba for some trainings we are leading.  The next week we'll be back in Iquitos to train here and then the following week we will be travelling to Pucallpa.  Lots of travelling and training.  It would be great if we could just do this training for the whole mission in the same week, but it's just not possible with the geography here.  

The other weird thing about being the assistant is that we know everything--not that we're smarter than everyone else, but we get told everything.  Just thinking back as a Zone Leader, I called the assistants every once in a while with problems that I couldn’t solve on my own.  Well, when all 8 zones have to do that... you can see how that’s a lot of information.  We get calls about twice a week, which sometimes turns into a project for me and my companion.  It's all very interesting and sometimes somewhat boring.  I didn't realize that there could be so many problems, especially with health and other things like that.  Problems range from health to paperwork to stalkers [oh my!] to just about everything else you could imagine.  Here in the offices, there are 3 secretaries also working here and they have lots of other things to do with immigration, finances, records, supplies, etc and we seem to be involved with all of that too.  

Just one quick experience that I had this week:  We went on splits with a companionship of Zone Leaders here and I went with Elder Bravo, my second companion.  When we were just out teaching, I could see that we are both the same people that we were before, over a year ago, but we've also each done a lot of growing.   It was just cool to get to go proselyte with him again.  BTW we did get out to work a lot more this week, which was a really good thing because if I were in here all day, every day, I would probably go crazy.

I love you guys and I’ll write you all next week!

Elder Peacock

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